Abstract: The research studies dedicated to the memory of the Second World War have become a research priority in Europe, particularly after the fall of the communist regime and the re-establishment of the balance of power between the East and the West, in close connection with the social, cultural, and identity-based policies promoted by the European Union. The main objective of such studies is to understand the manner in which the Second World War is remembered, starting from the assumption that “the past is always practiced in the present, not because the past imposes itself, but because subjects in the present fashion the past in the practice of their social identity” (Friedman, 1994 quoted by Kapralski, 2017, 2). Research efforts have been mostly aimed at the study of war “narratives” in general and the Holocaust narrative in particular, the latter becoming the dominant narrative in Europe after the 1990s. Following this line of research, the current study seeks to outline the agenda of commemorative events dedicated to the memory of the Holocaust in Romania, as well as the actors and the narratives they promote, relying on a corpus of 116 online press contents commemorating the Holocaust, as published in the online edition of Adevărul, in the period between March 2015 and March 2020.
Abstract: Studie se zabývá obrozením budapešťského židovské čtvrti. Část města, kterou dnes takto označujeme, leží v centru Budapešti, konkrétně ve čtvrtích Erzsébet a Teréz, na hranici šestého a sedmého městského obvodu. Ve studii jsou na příkladech několika restaurací, knihkupectví, prohlídkových okruhů a tzv. barů na staveništi popsány nové tendence, ke kterým v židovském městě dochází. Svou typickou architektonickou podobu získalo židovské město během 19. století a před první světovou válkou. V roce 1944 bylo na jeho území „velké ghetto“. Na zničení architektonicky cenné zástavby se nepodepsala ani tak válka, jako spíše období socializmu, které následovalo po ní. Budovy chátraly, různým vlnám modernizace a přestaveb však čtvrť nepodlehla. Po změně režimu dávalo město stále větší prostor investorům, kteří staré budovy demolovali. Proti těmto necitlivým zásahům se vzedmula vlna občanských iniciativ. Hospodářská krize, která vypukla v roce 2008, pomohla snahám aktivistů o záchranu čtvrti. Mnoho parcel zůstalo po stržení budov prázdných a další demolice byly odloženy. V zachovalých budovách a na volných prostranstvích začaly vznikat různé podniky se zvláštní atmosférou dočasnosti.
Abstract: Maintaining ‘faith’ in vaccination has emerged as a public health challenge amidst outbreaks of preventable disease among religious minorities and rising claims to ‘exemption’ from vaccine mandates. Outbreaks of measles and coronavirus have been particularly acute among Orthodox Jewish neighbourhoods in North America, Europe and Israel, yet no comparative studies have been conducted to discern the shared and situated influences on vaccine decision-making.
This paper synthesises qualitative research into vaccine decision-making among Orthodox Jews in the United Kingdom and Israel during the 2014–15 and 2018-19 measles epidemics, and 2020–21 coronavirus pandemic. The methods integrate 66 semi-structured informal interviews conducted with parents, formal and informal healthcare practitioners, and religious leaders, as well as analysis of tailored non-vaccination advocacy events and literature.
The paper argues that the discourse of ‘religious’ exemption and opposition to vaccination obscures the diverse practices and philosophies that inform vaccine decisions, and how religious law and leaders form a contingent influence. Rather than viewing religion as the primary framework through which vaccine decisions are made, Orthodox Jewish parents were more concerned with safety, trust and choice in similar ways to ‘secular’ logics of non-vaccination. Yet, religious frameworks were mobilised, and at times politicised, to suit medico-legal discourse of ‘exemption’ from coercive or mandatory vaccine policies. By conceptualising tensions around protection as ‘political immunities,’ the paper offers a model to inform social science understandings of how health, law and religion intersect in contemporary vaccine opposition.
Abstract: Aim: What was the attitude of the first Croatian president Franjo Tuđman and the Croatian leadership towards the Holocaust and the Jewish community in Croatia in the 1990s? Some considered Tuđman a Holocaust denier because of the purportedly controversial parts of his 1989 book Bespuća povijesne zbiljnosti (Wastelands of Historical Reality). The Croatian leadership was accused of minimizing World War II crimes of the Ustasha regime and rehabilitating the World War II Independent State of Croatia.
Methods: We analyzed archival documents, Tuđman’s published correspondence, controversial parts of his Wastelands of Historical Reality, his public statements, biographical writings of contemporary Croatian leaders, and newspaper articles. We scrutinized the Serbian propaganda against Croatia in the 1990s, the position and role of the Jewish community and prominent Jews in Croatian public life as well as the relations between Croatia and Israel.
Findings: The Croatian leadership and the Jewish community maintained good relations in the 1990s. Some prominent Croatian Jews actively advocated for Croatia’s international recognition and refuted certain authors’ and some Jewish international circles’ accusations of antisemitism among Croatian leadership. Jews participated at the highest levels of Croatian government. Democratic changes at the beginning of the 1990s enabled national, religious, political and other freedoms for minorities in Croatia, including the Jewish community. Still, some authors considered Tuđman an anti-Semite and a Holocaust denier. These opinions were partly shaped by quotes from the Wastelands of Historical Reality taken out of context and published by Serbian propagandists. This propaganda successfully shaped the false perception of official antisemitism in Croatia and has contributed to the delay in the establishment of the diplomatic relations between Croatia and Israel for more than five years after Israel had recognized Croatia.
Conclusion: There is no evidence for claims of political antisemitism in Croatia in the 1990s. This article sheds light on this widely manipulated topic and provides a basis for further researchs.
Abstract: This paper examines the discourse around anti-Semitism in Germany since 2000. The discourse makes use of the figure of the Jew for national security purposes (i.e. via the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the trope of the “dangerous Muslim”) and the politics of national identity. The article introduces the concept of the “War on Anti-Semitism”, an assemblage of policies about national belonging and security that are propelled primarily by white racial anxieties. While the War on Terror is fought against the Muslim Other, or the War on Drugs is fought against predominantly Latinx and Black communities, the War on Anti-Semitism is ostensibly fought on behalf of the racialized Jewish Other. The War on Anti-Semitism serves as a pretext justifying Germany's internal and external security measures by providing a logic for the management of non-white migration in an ethnically diverse yet white supremacist Europe.
In 2000, a new citizenship law fundamentally changed the architecture of belonging and im/migration by replacing the old Wilhelminian jus sanguinis (principle of blood) with a jus soli (principle of residency). In the wake of these changes and the resulting racial anxiety about Germanness, state sponsored civil-society educational programs to fight anti-Semitism emerged, targeting predominantly Muslim non-/citizens. These education programs were developed alongside international debates around the War on Terror and what came to be called “Israel-oriented anti-Semitism” in Germany (more commonly known as “Muslim anti-Semitism”).
Triangulated through the enduring legacy of colonial racialization, the Jew and the Muslim are con/figured as enemies in socio-political German discourses. This analysis of the War on Anti-Semitism has serious implications for our understanding of “New Europe”. By focusing on the figure of the Jew and the Muslim, the implications of this work transcend national borders and stress the important connection between fantasy, power, and racialization in Germany and beyond.
Abstract: The main purpose of this article is to consider the dynamics and features of Jewish communities and organisations in Ukraine in the context of current socio-cultural and socio-political processes. This involves the following tasks: to reveal the principles and nature of the so-called "umbrella" Jewish organisations that unite local communities and to reconstruct the dynamics of the Jewish segment in Ukrainian society. The analysis is based on a systematic reconstruction of theoretical models of religious phenomena and their connection with modern research subjects in the field of practical religious studies. The author argues that the activities of Jewish religious organisations and communities are manifested in various spheres of life, particularly education, charity, and social work. At the same time, the article identifies challenges that remain relevant for religious communities and organisations, such as financing initiatives, the assistance in reducing the level of anti-Semitism in the country, and raising the level of Jewish education. The study of the functioning of Jewish religious communities in Ukraine in connection with the development of civic institutions allows to investigate the actualisation of this type of activities, as well as their impact on public life. That is why, in the context of the analysis and the goals formulated in this work, specific examples of the dynamic functioning of Jewish religious communities have been considered.
Abstract: In this paper I critically examine the conflation of Turk with Muslim, explore the Turkish experience of Nazism, and examine Turkey's relation to the darkest era of German history. Whereas many assume that Turks in Germany cannot share in the Jewish past, and that for them the genocide of the Jews is merely a borrowed memory, I show how intertwined the history of Turkey and Germany, Turkish and German anti-Semitism, and Turks and Jews are. Bringing together the histories of individual Turkish citizens who were Jewish or Dönme (descendants of Jews) in Nazi Berlin with the history of Jews in Turkey, I argue the categories “Turkish” and “Jewish” were converging identities in the Third Reich. Untangling them was a matter of life and death. I compare the fates of three neighbors in Berlin: Isaak Behar, a Turkish Jew stripped of his citizenship by his own government and condemned to Auschwitz; Fazli Taylan, a Turkish citizen and Dönme, whom the Turkish government exerted great efforts to save; and Eric Auerbach, a German Jew granted refuge in Turkey. I ask what is at stake for Germany and Turkey in remembering the narrative of the very few German Jews saved by Turkey, but in forgetting the fates of the far more numerous Turkish Jews in Nazi-era Berlin. I conclude with a discussion of the political effects today of occluding Turkish Jewishness by failing to remember the relationship between the first Turkish migration to Germany and the Shoah.
Abstract: This response puts Tzuberi's analysis into a broader comparative context. First, the post-1990 attempt to create Jews in the image of the liberal-secular German nation-state met considerable resistance by the Central Council of Jews in Germany. In addition, the majority of post-Soviet Jews showed no interest in liberal Jewish theology or the fantasy of reviving the German-Jewish past. Second, the milieu of Judaizing Germans (core architects of German-Jewish revivalism) shows a strong resemblance to other attempts of escaping colonial whiteness, including patterns of what has been called »ethnic fraud.« Third, in comparison to other cases of minority repatriation, the German practice of expiatory demographic engineering was relatively cost-intensive, but contributed considerably to the country's »nation re-branding« after reunification. Fourth, the German politics of reforestation vis-à-vis its Jewish community points to the rise of a post-migratory »gardening state,« heavily invested in regulating its diverse population through a policy mix of migration, education and surveillance.
Abstract: This article focuses on the media practices of Russian-speaking Orthodox Jews seeking patterns of observance relevant to secular modernity. The author applies the conceptual framework of “communicative figurations” to describe the process of everyday Torah observance in post-Soviet countries, Israel, the United States, and Western Europe. Empirical research on media repertoires reveals that members of post-Soviet Orthodox communities use Facebook and Instagram to maintain closed women’s groups and rabbis’ blogs focused on observance. Women’s groups frame everyday observance in terms of modesty, family purity, the kosher home, and the like. Personal rabbis’ blogs introduce practices of “digital Judaism” that include Torah lessons, the daily page of the Talmud, question and answer exchanges, and so forth. Content-based textual analyses uncover thematic intersections, the circulation of stories, and reciprocal hyperlinks between both types of groups. The media practices of women’s groups and rabbis’ blogs link the local Russian-speaking Jewish communities with a transnational Orthodox constellation.
